Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge - launched in 1994 - alongside many other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results.

The use of protocols has quickly spread from conferences and workshops to everyday school and university settings. Now in its third edition, this perennial bestseller features substantial updates that take into account recent developments in the field of facilitative leadership. The authors have also added eleven totally new protocols, including the "Peer Review Protocol" and "Looking at Student Work with Equity in Mind." This essential teaching and professional development tool includes: step-by-step descriptions of how educators can use protocols to study together, work on problems of practice, teach well, and explore students' work, explanations of the particular purpose of each protocol, discussions of the value that educators have found in using them, and helpful tips for facilitators, a free supplement on the Teachers College Press website with ""Abbreviated Protocols"" that can be downloaded and customised to suit each facilitator's needs.

Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation's largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge - launched in 1994 - alongside many other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless. McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results.